Post-. Wayne Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ the birds

      skim the field, then rise

      to the trees: that one,

      now that one—

      dozens of them

      dipping and cutting

      in Romantic abandon,

      such flawless

      precision!—

      (Let’s remember:

      this is how they feed—)

THE FIRST YEAR

      1

      The new parents rose

      to throw stone after stone

      into the pond. The moonlight

      barely touched them.

      The surface erupted with sound

      every time it was breached.

      All those stones planted

      in that pressurized dark

      at the bottom of the pond,

      the temperature dropping,

      the water beginning to ice.

      When the first stone hit

      and didn’t sink

      they stopped their throwing

      to observe the stone

      still with them in the silent air.

      2

      Meanwhile, indiscernibly,

      the water was draining

      through a buried system

      of pipes. They tossed their stones

      onto the ice; each skittered

      to an unreachable place.

      That long winter,

      the ice covered with stones

      kept lowering—until at last

      it rested on the mud

      and the stones they’d thrown

      those months ago. Then

      the sun began to rise,

      and the ice began to melt,

      and it was spring.

INSIDE THE BOOK

      For my daughter: these images,

      these trenches of script. She keeps

      reaching to pull them

      from the page, as if the book

      were an opened cabinet;

      every time, the page

      blocks her hand. They’re right

      there—those pictures

      vivid as stained glass,

      those tiny, inscrutable knots.

      They hang in that space

      where a world was built

      in fits and erasures—she wants

      to lift that world

      into her own.

      Meanwhile, this world

      floods her thoughts,

      her voice; it fills

      the windows, the streets

      she moves through;

      it reaches into her

      as the air reaches into her lungs.

      Then, before we know it,

      here she is with us

      inside the book.

THE PEOPLE’S HISTORY

      The People moved up the street in a long column—

      like a machine boring a tunnel. They sang

      the People’s songs, they chanted the People’s slogans:

      We are the People, not the engines of the city;

      we, the People, will not be denied.

      Then the People

      descended upon the People, swinging hardwood batons

      heavy with the weight of the People’s intent.

      And the People surged, then, into the rows before them,

      pushing the People against the blurred arcs

      of truncheons, the People throwing rocks

      into the plastic shields and visors,

      behind which

      the People blinked when the rocks hit, then pushed back

      so the mass of People before them compressed.

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